The Most Beautiful Mosques in the World
61 places in 28 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful mosques in the world are Hagia Sophia (Turkey), Koutoubia Mosque (Morocco) and Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The list covers 61 mosques in 28 countries. Iran has the most, with 8. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A mosque grows from a few requirements: a prayer hall facing Mecca, a mihrab marking that direction, usually a courtyard with water for ablution and a minaret for the call to prayer. Around that simple core, centuries of builders worked out very different answers: Persian iwans sheathed in tile, Ottoman cascades of domes, the mud-brick towers of the Sahel, mosques laid out like Chinese temples. What makes one exceptional is the handling of light, geometry and surface, the way a dome, a pattern or a line of calligraphy holds a large space together.
Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque in Sarajevo is a sixteenth-century Ottoman work at the heart of the old bazaar. The Koutoubia in Marrakesh keeps its twelfth-century Almohad minaret, and Sheikh Lotfollah on Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan has no minaret at all, only a dome whose tiles shift colour with the light. The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali is the best-known mud-brick building in the world, replastered by the town each year. The Great Mosque of Xi'an arranges its courtyards and pavilions like a Chinese temple, while the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, designed by Vedat Dalokay, takes the form of a vast tent below the Margalla Hills.
The mosques here were chosen for how they look and ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, with separate pages by country.
In this list
01 Hagia Sophia
Ayasofya
Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by edibejko from Pixabay The building that stands today was put up in barely five years. In January 532 the Nika riots burned down the previous church on the site, and within weeks Emperor Justinian I had started a far more ambitious replacement, designed by two scholars rather than master masons: Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, and Isidore of Miletus, a geometer. It was dedicated in 537. Its central dome, carried on four curved triangular pendentives over a square plan, created the largest enclosed interior of its age and changed what architects believed was possible. For nearly a thousand years it was the cathedral of Constantinople and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, and it remained the largest church in the world until the twelfth century.
Did you know? Envoys of the Kievan Rus' prince reported that inside they could not tell whether they were in heaven or on earth, a verdict tied to Rus' conversion to Orthodoxy.
02 Koutoubia Mosque
Morocco · 1.2 km from Marrakesh31.624° N 7.994° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by DEZALB from Pixabay The minaret of the Koutoubia is the landmark by which Marrakesh has measured itself for eight centuries. It rises about 77 m, its main square shaft almost 13 m wide, built of rubble masonry and sandstone that takes on a pink-gold tone in the evening. Bands of interlaced lobed arches — the lattice pattern called sebka — cover the upper shaft, a strip of white and green glazed tile runs near the top, stepped merlons crown it, and the small lantern above ends in a finial of copper globes, the largest about 2 m across. Beside them is the pole on which the green flag is raised for Friday prayer. Local rules still forbid tall buildings nearby so that nothing competes with it.
Did you know? The minaret has no stairs: a broad internal ramp winds past six stacked rooms, wide enough for the muezzin to ride a horse to the top.
03 Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque
Bosnia and Herzegovina · 3.8 km from Sarajevo43.859° N 18.429° E
Yann Forget · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque stands at the heart of Baščaršija, the old Ottoman market quarter of Sarajevo, its great dome and a single monumental minaret rising above a courtyard shaded by centuries-old lime trees. Completed around 1530–31, it is the largest historic mosque in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the finest Ottoman buildings in the Balkans, and it has served as the city's main congregational mosque since the day it opened.
Did you know? Every day after the noon prayer, thirty reciters each read one of the Quran's thirty parts at the same time, completing it daily as the founder ordained.
04 Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Turkey · 1.4 km from Istanbul41.005° N 28.977° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by OWPictures from Pixabay Sultan Ahmed I commissioned this at just 19 years old, and it was built between 1609 and 1616 — a low point in Ottoman fortunes, coming right after an unfavorable peace ended a long war with Persia. An imperial mosque of this scale was, among other things, a calculated show of confidence: proof the empire hadn't actually faltered. Ahmed died the year after it was finished, at 27.
Did you know? The tile orders swallowed the entire İznik industry, and in 1613 the sultan banned making or selling tiles for anyone else until his were finished.
05 Faisal Mosque
Pakistan · 6 km from Islamabad33.730° N 73.037° E
Image by IdeasLeader from Pixabay The Faisal Mosque does not look like a mosque, and that was deliberate. In 1969 Pakistan held an international competition for a national mosque in its new capital, Islamabad. It drew more than forty entries from seventeen countries. The Turkish architect Vedat Dalokay won with a design that left out the dome altogether. In its place, eight sloping shells of concrete meet above the prayer hall like the folds of a desert tent. Four minarets about 90 metres high stand at the corners, slender as pencils. Construction ran from 1976 to 1986. The work was funded largely by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and after his death in 1975 the mosque and the avenue leading to it were named after him.
Did you know? Vedat Dalokay first drew a tent-like, domeless mosque for Ankara's Kocatepe competition in 1957; it won but was dropped after criticism, and a reworked version became the Faisal Mosque.
06 Great Mosque of Djenné
Mali · 0.8 km from Djenné13.905° N 4.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
BluesyPete · CC BY-SA 3.0 This is the largest mud-brick building on Earth, raised on a platform above the Bani River floodplain to keep it above the annual floodwaters. Its present form dates to a 1907 reconstruction, built on foundations going back to the 13th century. The walls are built from banco — a mix of clay, water, shea butter, baobab powder and rice husks — and the wooden beams (toron) bristling from every surface aren't decorative flourishes; they double as the scaffolding masons stand on to reach the upper walls during repairs.
Did you know? The spires crowning the three towers of the prayer wall are each topped with an ostrich egg.
07 Dome of the Rock
Palestine · 2.7 km from Jerusalem31.778° N 35.235° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by best-biketours from Pixabay The Dome of the Rock is the oldest surviving major work of Islamic architecture, and its golden dome is the image most people carry of Jerusalem. The octagonal shrine stands at the centre of the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, in the Old City. It is not a mosque in the everyday sense but a monument built over a rock: the Foundation Stone, from which Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad began his Night Journey to heaven, and which Jewish tradition associates with the site of the Temple and with Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son.
Did you know? Abd al-Malik's shrine reportedly cost seven times the annual tax revenue of Egypt.
08 Shah Mosque
Iran · 5.6 km from Isfahan32.655° N 51.678° E
Citypeek · CC BY-SA 2.5 Shah Abbas I did not just want a mosque — he wanted a full civic reset. When he moved the Safavid capital to Isfahan, he built an entire square, Naqsh-e Jahan, around a new commercial and religious centre, and this mosque anchors its southern end. Construction began in 1611, the twenty-fourth year of his reign, though the finishing touches — much of the tilework and calligraphy — were completed under his successors, which is part of why the decoration never feels rushed or uneven.
Did you know? The mosque is said to contain some 18 million bricks and about 475,000 tiles.
09 Badshahi Mosque
Pakistan · 4.7 km from Lahore31.588° N 74.309° E
Image by tayyab3425 from Pixabay The Badshahi Mosque, the "Imperial Mosque", faces the Alamgiri Gate of the Lahore Fort across the garden square of Hazuri Bagh on the edge of the Walled City of Lahore. It was commissioned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1671 and completed in about two years under the supervision of his foster brother Fidai Khan Koka, governor of Lahore. It was the largest mosque built in the Mughal era, and for some three centuries it had no rival in size anywhere in the world; it remains one of Pakistan's defining landmarks.
Did you know? Aurangzeb built the mosque to commemorate his military campaigns in southern India, above all those against the Maratha ruler Shivaji.
10 Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque
Iran · 5.3 km from Isfahan32.657° N 51.679° E
Image by engelbachm from Pixabay The Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque is the most intimate of the great buildings on Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan and, to many who have stood inside it, the most perfect. It has no minaret and no courtyard, just a single square prayer hall, about 19 metres on each side, under a single-shell dome some 13 metres across and 32 metres high. From the square the dome reads first as a soft cream-coloured cupola, faced with tiles that seem to change tone through the day, from pinkish in the early light to beige around noon and warmer, darker hues towards sunset, patterned with arabesques in blue and white.
Did you know? Because the square sits at 45 degrees to the direction of Mecca, the dome appears shifted about 6.5 metres to the side of the entrance portal.
11 Great Mosque of Xi'an
People's Republic of China · 4.3 km from Xi'an34.263° N 108.937° E
Zossolino · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Great Mosque of Xi'an looks at first like a Chinese temple. Its prayer hall is a timber building with a turquoise-tiled hipped roof, painted wooden bracket sets and a six-columned porch, and the way to it leads through a sequence of walled courtyards with gardens, stone gateways and pavilions. There is no dome, and no conventional minaret. Only the orientation gives the game away: instead of facing south like most Chinese religious buildings, the whole complex is laid out on a long east–west axis, so that worshippers in the hall at its western end face Mecca.
Did you know? During the Cultural Revolution the mosque was closed and temporarily turned into a steel factory before returning to worship.
12 Umayyad Mosque
Syria · 1.3 km from Damascus33.511° N 36.307° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SLPix from Pixabay The Umayyad Mosque, the Great Mosque of Damascus, stands in the old city on a site that has been holy for about three thousand years. The Arameans built a temple here to the storm god Hadad; the Romans enlarged it into a vast sanctuary of Jupiter, whose inner enclosure walls still form the outer walls of the mosque; and at the end of the fourth century it became a cathedral. After the Muslim conquest of 634 the building was shared for decades, until the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I, whose dynasty had made Damascus the capital of the caliphate, took over the whole site after 705 and built the mosque over the following years, compensating the Christians with other churches in the city.
Did you know? About 12,000 labourers built the mosque, among them Coptic, Persian, Indian, Greek and North African craftsmen.
13 Selimiye Mosque
Turkey · 1.2 km from Edirne41.678° N 26.559° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Mozder from Pixabay The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne is the building its architect considered his masterpiece. Mimar Sinan, the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, built it for Sultan Selim II between 1568 and 1575, and it is widely regarded as the summit of Ottoman — and much of Islamic — architecture. Selim chose Edirne, the former capital and his favourite city, rather than Istanbul, and the mosque was paid for in part from the spoils of the conquest of Cyprus. The sultan died in 1574 without seeing it finished.
Did you know? Sinan was about 80 when he built the Selimiye, which he called his masterwork after the Şehzade, his apprentice work, and the Süleymaniye, his journeyman work.
14 Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque
Τέμενος Λαλά Μουσταφά Πασά
Cyprus · 0.7 km from Famagusta35.125° N 33.943° E
Catsimpoolas, Nicholas · Public domain The largest medieval building in Famagusta began life as the Latin cathedral of St Nicholas and has been a mosque since 1571, and the double identity is visible at a glance: a French Gothic cathedral front that has served Muslim worship for more than four centuries. The Lusignan kings, a French dynasty that ruled Cyprus from 1192 to 1489, brought the latest northern French architecture with them. Construction ran from 1298 into the early 14th century, an inscription on a buttress records progress in 1311, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1328. The Lusignans were crowned kings of Cyprus in Nicosia and then crowned here as kings of Jerusalem.
Did you know? King James II of Cyprus and his infant son James III, the last two Lusignan kings, were buried here in 1473 and 1474.
15 al-Azhar Mosque
Egypt · 1.6 km from Cairo30.046° N 31.263° E
Image by lapping from Pixabay Al-Azhar is the oldest mosque of Fatimid Cairo and one of the most influential places of learning in the Islamic world. Work began in 970, a year after the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli founded a new royal city beside the older settlement of Fustat, and the first Friday prayers were held in 972. Built to spread the Ismaili Shia teachings of the Fatimid caliphs, the mosque soon became a school as well, and by the late 10th century scholars were being paid to teach here, the beginning of an institution that grew into al-Azhar University.
Did you know? Construction of al-Azhar began in 970, and the first Friday prayers took place in 972.
16 Sheikh Zayed Mosque
United Arab Emirates · 12.5 km from Abu Dhabi24.412° N 54.474° E
Image by Mariakray from Pixabay The people who planned this mosque weren't going for one look — they wanted the whole story of Islamic architecture in a single building. Walk from the base of a minaret to its tip and you pass through three different empires: a square foundation drawn from Moroccan tradition, an octagonal midsection borrowed from the Mamluks of Cairo, and a cylindrical crown modeled on Ottoman minarets. The dome layout follows the floor plan of Lahore's Badshahi Mosque, a Mughal-era landmark, while the ornamental detail leans toward Persian and Moorish patterns. It reads less like a single architect's vision and more like a deliberate anthology of a millennium of mosque-building.
Did you know? Its courtyard, about 17,000 square metres of inlaid marble flowers, is considered the largest marble mosaic in the world.
17 Imam Husayn Mausoleum
Iraq · 0.8 km from Karbala32.616° N 44.032° E
User:HerbertReichart germany · Public domain A golden dome over the grave of Husayn ibn Ali stands at the heart of Karbala in central Iraq, and every year it draws one of the largest religious gatherings on earth. Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, was killed here in the Battle of Karbala in 680, and the shrine raised over his burial place is among the holiest sites of Shia Islam. Each year the Arba'in pilgrimage, which closes the forty days of mourning that follow Ashura, brings millions of people to the city; on the anniversary of his death the number of pilgrims has been put as high as 35 million.
Did you know? The metal enclosure over the grave, installed in 2013, weighs about 12 tonnes and contains roughly 118 kg of gold and four tonnes of silver.
18 Hassan II Mosque
Morocco · 1.5 km from Casablanca33.607° N 7.633° W
Image by postcardtrip from Pixabay King Hassan II built this mosque on a foundation that should not really exist: reclaimed land driven into the Atlantic, with roughly half the structure extending out over open water. The idea traces to a specific line in the Quran describing God's throne as resting upon water, and Hassan II was explicit about his reasoning — worshippers on solid ground should be able to look out at sky and ocean at the same time. Committing to that idea forced real engineering problems. Salt air corrodes most metals, so the doors were made of titanium instead. The reclaimed marine foundation alone needed 300,000 cubic metres of concrete and 40,000 tonnes of steel just to hold stable ground under a building of this size.
Did you know? About twelve million Moroccans contributed to the building fund, each receiving a receipt and certificate, and the smallest recorded donation was just 5 dirhams.
19 Kalta Minor
Uzbekistan · 1.4 km from Khiva41.378° N 60.358° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Squat, broad and sheathed from base to top in glazed tiles of turquoise, green, blue and white, Kalta Minor is the most recognisable silhouette inside the walls of Khiva — and it owes its fame to the fact that it was never finished. Its name means "short minaret" in Uzbek. It stands in Itchan Kala, the walled inner town of Khiva, whose mosques, madrasas and palaces form a historic quarter inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Did you know? According to legend, the Emir of Bukhara tried to hire the architect to build an even taller minaret, and the master fled Khiva to escape the khan's wrath.
20 Al-Masjid Al-Haram
Saudi Arabia · 1.3 km from Mecca21.422° N 39.826° E
Saudipics.com · CC BY-SA 4.0 Muslim tradition holds that the Kaaba at the centre of this mosque was first built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, and that the Prophet Muhammad, after his conquest of Mecca in 630 CE, cleared away the idols that had gathered around it and rededicated the site to the worship of one God. A mosque enclosing the Kaaba has stood on this spot ever since, though the oldest sections of the structure visible today date only to Ottoman-era rebuilding in the 16th century.
Did you know? The 2025 lighting of the circumambulation area used about 550 custom chandeliers and luminaires gilded with more than 200 kg of 24-carat gold.
21 Prophet's Mosque
Saudi Arabia · 5 km from Medina24.468° N 39.611° E
Image by ebrahim from Pixabay Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, the Mosque of the Prophet, stands at the heart of Medina and is the second holiest site in Islam after the Great Mosque of Mecca. Muhammad himself helped build the first mosque here in 622, soon after arriving in the city: a courtyard with walls of mud brick, a roof of palm trunks, clay and fronds barely 3.6 metres high, and three doors. It served as a place of prayer, a court, a school and a meeting hall for the young community. Tradition records that the land belonged to two orphans and that the Prophet insisted on paying for it rather than accepting it as a gift.
Did you know? The first concave mihrab, the curved prayer niche now found in mosques everywhere, was introduced here during the Umayyad rebuilding of the early 8th century.
22 Friday Mosque of Herat
Afghanistan · 2.8 km from Herat34.343° N 62.196° E
Todd Huffman · CC BY 2.0 Glazed tile mosaic in blues, greens, turquoise and ochre covers the courtyard façades of Herat's Friday Mosque, framing a vast paved court with four great arched halls facing one another across it. The Masjid-i Jami of Herat is the oldest congregational mosque of the city and one of the great monuments of the eastern Islamic world, a building begun by the Ghurid sultans around 1200 and remade by every dynasty that held Herat afterwards.
Did you know? The complex is roofed by about 460 small domes carried on more than 440 pillars, a forest of vaults hidden behind the tiled courtyard façades.
23 Jameh Mosque of Isfahan
Iran · 3.8 km from Isfahan32.670° N 51.685° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Hamidespanani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, the city's Friday Mosque, is less a single building than a thousand-year archive of Iranian architecture. A mosque has stood on this site since around 771, and it was rebuilt, extended and redecorated by nearly every dynasty that ruled the city until modern times. It adjoins Isfahan's Grand Bazaar, which runs up to its south-west side, and it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
Did you know? The first mosque on the site, built around 771 under the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, measured roughly 52 by 90 metres.
24 Great Mosque of Samarra
Iraq · 1.4 km from Samarra34.206° N 43.880° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Chris Hoare · CC BY 2.0 In the 9th century the Abbasid caliphs left Baghdad and built a new capital upstream on the east bank of the Tigris. Samarra was founded by al-Mu'tasim in 836 and remained the seat of the caliphate until 892, and in those few decades it filled with palaces and mosques. Its grandest monument was the Great Mosque raised by Caliph al-Mutawakkil between 848 and 851. When it was finished it was the largest mosque in the world: the enclosure covered about 166,000 square metres and could hold more than 60,000 worshippers under a roof carried on 464 pillars in seventeen aisles.
Did you know? The minaret's name, al-Malwiya, is usually rendered as the snail-shell tower, after the ramp coiling around it.
25 Šarena Mosque
North Macedonia · 0.5 km from Tetovo42.006° N 20.967° E
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 3.0 In the old quarter of Tetovo, beside the Pena river that tumbles down from the Šar Mountains, stands a small mosque covered inside and out in painted ornament. Its local names all point to the same thing: Šarena Džamija in Macedonian and Alaca Cami in Turkish mean the colourful or decorated mosque, while the city's Albanian residents mostly call it Xhamia e Pashës, the Pasha's Mosque. Instead of the glazed tiles found in many Ottoman interiors, its walls carry bright painted panels of flowers, geometric patterns, landscapes and buildings.
Did you know? An Ottoman verse inscription by Derviş Mehmed Muradi records the rebuilding in the form of a chronogram, praising Abdurrahman Pasha for making this colourful mosque.
26 Bolo Haouz Mosque
Uzbekistan · 1.9 km from Bukhara39.778° N 64.407° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay Twenty slender wooden columns, so tall and thin they seem barely able to carry the painted ceiling above them, give the Bolo Haouz Mosque its unmistakable silhouette, and their reflection in the pool in front completes the picture. The mosque stands on the old Registan square of Bukhara, directly opposite the Ark, the fortress-residence of the city's rulers, and before the revolution it was the main Friday mosque of Bukhara, where the emir himself came to pray.
Did you know? Because its twenty columns are doubled by their reflection in the pool, locals often call it the forty-pillar mosque.
27 Süleymaniye Mosque
Turkey · 0.9 km from Istanbul41.016° N 28.964° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay The Süleymaniye crowns Istanbul's Third Hill, and from the water its silhouette — a great central dome shouldered by cascading half-domes and four slender minarets — is one of the defining outlines of the old city's skyline. It was built for Suleiman the Magnificent by his chief architect Mimar Sinan; the inscription over the entrance gives 1550 for the foundation and 1557 for the inauguration. Suleiman meant it to surpass everything built by his predecessors, and to answer Justinian's Hagia Sophia across the city: the plan, with a central dome flanked by half-domes front and back, deliberately echoes the Byzantine church, recast a thousand years later in the Ottoman idiom.
Did you know? Sinan is said to have channelled the smoke of the mosque's oil lamps into a chamber above the entrance, where the soot was gathered and turned into calligraphers' ink.
28 Great Mosque of Kairouan
Tunisia · 0.4 km from Kairouan35.681° N 10.104° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
weetoon66 · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Great Mosque of Kairouan, also known as the Mosque of Uqba, stands at the heart of one of the oldest cities of Islamic North Africa. Kairouan was founded in 670 by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a garrison town on the dry plain of central Tunisia, and a mosque was laid out at the same time. Nothing visible survives of that first building: it was destroyed and rebuilt several times, and the structure seen today is essentially the work of the Aghlabid emirs, above all Ziyadat Allah I, who rebuilt it in 836, and his successors, who embellished it in the 860s and 870s. The city around it grew into a centre of learning and pilgrimage, and its walled medina is protected with the mosque as a World Heritage Site since 1988.
Did you know? The prayer hall holds 414 columns, and the mosque as a whole has more than 500.
29 Bibi-Khanym Mosque
Uzbekistan · 3.2 km from Samarkand39.661° N 66.980° E
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay The Bibi-Khanym Mosque was meant to be the greatest mosque in the world, and for a while it may have been. Timur ordered it in 1399, on his return from the Indian campaign, to crown his new capital of Samarkand; the work was nearly finished when he came back from his next campaign in 1404, and, displeased, he had the main dome altered on the spot. The mosque carries the name of his senior wife, Saray Mulk Khanum, and tradition credits her with commissioning it. It is counted among the masterpieces of the Timurid age, and its ambition influenced building across Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan.
Did you know? About 500 people built the mosque, including some 200 architects, artists and masons drawn from across Timur's empire, helped by 95 Indian elephants.
30 Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif
Afghanistan · 1.4 km from Mazar-i-Sharif36.709° N 67.111° E
Françoise Foliot · CC BY-SA 4.0 The city of Mazar-i-Sharif takes its name from this building: the name is usually rendered as "tomb of the exalted", and the exalted one is Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth caliph. Most Muslims place Ali's grave at Najaf in Iraq, but a long tradition in this part of Central Asia holds that his body was carried east and buried here, and the shrine is venerated by Sunni and Shia alike. Known in Afghanistan as the Rawza-i Sharif, the noble shrine, and abroad simply as the Blue Mosque, it is the spiritual and visual centre of northern Afghanistan.
Did you know? According to legend, the forgotten grave was rediscovered in the twelfth century when Ali appeared in the dreams of hundreds of local notables and revealed where it lay.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful mosque in the world?
- On our list, Hagia Sophia (Turkey) ranks first, followed by Koutoubia Mosque (Morocco) and Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque (Bosnia and Herzegovina).
- Which country has the most beautiful mosques?
- In our collection, the most come from Iran (8), Turkey (8) and Uzbekistan (6).
- What is the largest mosque in the world?
- The Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, which surrounds the Kaaba, is the largest mosque in the world.
- What is a mihrab?
- A niche in the wall of a mosque that marks the qibla, the direction of Mecca toward which worshippers pray. It is often the most richly decorated part of the interior.
- How many mosques are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 61 mosques in 28 countries. Iran has the most, with 8.